Lucio Fontana: From the Earth to the Cosmos, M&L Fine Art, 15 Old Bond Street, London W1 (7 March-12 May 2017). Catalogue available.

M&L Fine Art is a new London exhibition venue which is a joint project of two Italian galleries. The current exhibition, Lucio Fontana: From the Earth to the Cosmos, brings together work from different phases of the career of Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) as a sculptor. It starts with a maquette the Italian-Argentinian sculptor made for a public commission in Italy. The bronze cast of two rearing horses (1936, no. 1) shows Fontana’s directness, lack of artifice and ability to convey an impression of energy.

Polychrome ceramics of the 1940s and early 1950s display the theatrical and baroque side to Fontana, which may have been imbued through his training and the influence of his sculptor father. These glazed, vigorously moulded figures are speckled by highlights, which give them a strongly pictorial appearance. In the large plates or plaques embellished with high relief motifs and scorings we notice a demonstration of Fontana’s hypertactility. His works are unusually tactile in form, baroque in character, full of flowing energy. The scene of a bull fight (executed at the same time as the early Spatial Concept (Concetto spaziale) series) is a masterpiece of dynamic form.

The most typical works are Spatial Concept works, started in the early 1950s. Those in the exhibition are fired clay tablets which have been punctured and scored while wet. In the 1954 example, white glaze has been applied to the holes, giving the impression of stars radiating light. The impression is further confirmed by gouaches on paper on the subject of constellations which were made as illustrations for the volume of poems Il prato del silenzio by Lina Angioletti. In these simple pieces the black void is punctuated by white dots, dotted lines and slashes. These are Fontana’s meditations on cosmic energy and spatial orders. The drawing-paintings balance chromatic austerity and formal exuberance.

The more highly coloured ceramics (Concetto spaziale: Natura morta (1957, nos. 15 and 16)) are altogether less successful. Restrained coloured forms on white discs look like nothing so much as nouvelle cuisine in ceramic shorthand. The glare of the areas of white and strongly coloured motifs work against each other and strain the eye, not least because the relief forms are unclear. (A case of Bataille’s informe revolting the eye which seeks clarity and order.) The more chromatically restrained yet dynamically energetic reliefs on circular supports – with their slashes of high relief and spatters of glaze – are very satisfying (1956, nos. 13 and 14). They are brusque and elegant, energetic and circumscribed.

The brightly coloured lacquer-surface ovoid forms dominated by single straight slashes are the Pillolas (1961-5, no. 20, red version and white version). As well as being the sculptures that come closest to Fontana’s slashes in canvases, these pieces (designed to be produced as multiples in different colours) are homages to industrial manufacturing and scientific progress. (Apparently, Fontana was impressed by the social liberation that contraceptive pills provided.) These Pillolas are mounted on rods above bases, similar to scientific models, something reinforced by the perfection of the surfaces. Even the slashes are immaculate.

The Pillolas can be interpreted in different ways. They could be seen as stagings of incisions (the creation of objects designed to carry or hold incisions). They could be seen as meditations on exteriority and interiority of forms. The incisions reveal the interiors of the body (or hint at it, they are inscrutably dark) but by doing so they literally make the interior a concave exterior of a form which no longer has a hermetically sealed interior. That is what makes them paradoxical. By ostensibly showing us the interior of a body, the very displaying of that interior eliminates that interior by making the interior part of the exterior which just happens to be extremely concave and illegible.

One could also see the holes as motifs. They are paradoxical kinds of motifs in that their only presence resides in the concentrated instances of an absence of ground.

The most surprising work in the exhibition is Concetto spaziale (1960-5, no. 19). The black, terracotta ovoid form (a kind of Euclidean and Platonic solid) is puckered by a line of gouges and a single curving incised line is very sensual. The tiniest of wrinkles on the surface resemble skin, or the processed skin of leather; an impression which is deepened by the delicate soft surface texture of the whole of the body. It is the most visually arresting of the works here.

The aesthetics of the cuts in the exhibited pieces is significant. There is the slit, the line, the hole, the wrinkled hole, the gouge, the puckered rip, the partially incomplete injury (the scratch, the scuff, the divot). It is hard to observe these markings as anything other than violent and anything other than corporeal. One is reminded of bodily injuries, surgical incisions, orifices, soft bodies afflicted by distortions. This is especially true of the forms in soft clay, less so for cuts in smooth hard surfaces, still less for slits in canvases, least of all for holes in paper. Fontana may have publicly discussed ideas of cosmology and atomic science, but the cuts and punctures in soft clay are often viewed of proxies for flesh. This does not seem an invalid response to the pieces. Our responses to seeing a hard object smashed or damaged by a blow is very different to how we see these pieces.

Our first response to all art is as viewers inhabiting human bodies, with bodily knowledge and concerns. We automatically relate material resembling flesh in terms of flesh, our own and that of others we have known.

When we view visibly and humanly manipulated material we understand how it feels to make such manipulations. We imagine making those marks. We mentally re-enact the manipulations and thus we experience a kind of theatre of the imagination where we participate in making the object before us. We imagine holding the stick and stabbing the clay tablet; we imagine holding the gouge and goring the perfect form; we imagine holding the knife and slashing the canvas. We are artist surrogates and the object is something we have – in our theatre of imagination – made. We take the art personally because we feel able to have done the act that made the art; we have imagined making it; we feel responsible for the art. Mentally, we run our hands over the surface, noticing the clamminess of the wet clay under our hands; we weigh the objects; we feel the tools in our hands. There is no mystery. It is our art. The only odd thing is that somehow the work we made in our theatre of the imagination happens to be on a plinth and happens to be venerated as art. Everything about it is fathomable and prosaic except that step of status elevation.

This well-chosen and carefully displayed exhibition reminds us of some of the fundamentals of what art is and how it operates.